Sunday, December 28, 2014

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

In Chapter 3 of his Miracles, Lewis' argument is simultaneously thick while his point is simple: Reason must precede Nature. Too sort out the logic of the chapter, I have tried to confer the argument in a syllogistic outline (which is neither my forte nor my preference). But I have done so, not only for my own sake, but for the sake of others, that the argument can become less opaque. Below is my best effort strewn together over free time during a couple of days.

I.It is clear that everything we know, beyond our
own immediate sensations, is inferred from those sensations.

a.Put in its most general form the inference would
run, ‘Since I am presented with colours, sounds, shapes, pleasures and pains
which I cannot perfectly predict or control, and since the more I investigate
them the more regular their behaviour appears, therefore there must exist
something other than myself and it must be systematic’.

II.All possible knowledge, then, depends on the
validity of reasoning… Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

III.It follows that no account of the universe can
be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real
insight.

IV.Naturalism discredits our processes of reasoning
or at least reduces their credit to such a humble level that it can no longer
support Naturalism itself.

a.There are two senses of the word ‘because’.

i.Cause and Effect

1.Definition

a.a dynamic connection between events or ‘states
of affairs’

b.essential to every event in Nature

2.Example

a.’Grandfather is ill today because he ate lobster yesterday.’

b.’He cried out because it hurt him.’

ii.Ground and Consequent

1.Definition

a.a logical relation between beliefs or assertions

b.essential to valid trains of reasoning

2.Example

a.’Grandfather is ill today because he hasn’t got up yet (and we know he is an invariably early
riser when he is well).’

c.This raises a dilemma: How can a thought-event
be both valid and caused? Or What is the relationship between logical causation
and natural causation in the event of a thought?

i.To be caused is not to be proved.

1.Example

a.Wishful thinkings, prejudices, and the delusions
of madness, are all caused but they are ungrounded.

2.Often, in fact, if a thought can be wholly
accounted for in terms of cause, it is considered false.

a.Example

i.‘You say that because you are a capitalist, or a
hypochondriac, or a mere man, or only a woman.’

3.The system of logic (ground-consequent) and the
system of nature (cause-effect) are wholly distinct.

ii.But even if a thought is grounded, this seems
irrelevant to its causation.

1.Thoughts tend to happen both logically and
illogically – in either case, they are caused.

iii.The solution may be this: We must say that just
as one way in which a mental event causes a subsequent mental event is by
Association (when I think of parsnips I think of my first school), so another
way in which it can cause it, is simply by being a ground for it.

1.Being logical causes a thought to happen.

2.Being a cause and being a proof coincide.

iv.But this is false because a thought does not
cause (like a trigger) the thoughts which logically precede or proceed from it.

1.This would mean thinking the thought ‘This is
glass’ would instantly trigger an infinite series of thoughts that are deduced
from it.

v.So then, this: One thought can cause another not
by being, but by being seen to be, a ground for it.

vi.Thoughts are unique events.

1.Most events are value neutral (neither true or
false, but merely states of affairs.)

a.To say ‘these events, or facts are false’ means
of course that someone’s account of them is false.

2.But a thought is about something other than itself and can be true or false.

vii.Acts of inference demand to be seen in two
lights:

1.A subjective event in somebody’s psychological
history.

a.In the inference ‘If A, then B’ we would say ‘Thought
B followed Thought A’.

2.They are insights into, or knowings of,
something other than themselves.

a.In the inference ‘If A, then B’ we would say ‘A
follows from B’.

i.If it ever ‘follows from’ in the logical sense,
it does so always.

b.We cannot possibly reject this as a subjective
illusion without discrediting all human knowledge.

i.We can know nothing, beyond our own sensations
at the moment unless the act of inference is the real insight that it claims to
be.

ii.An act of knowing must be determined, in a
sense, solely by what is known; we must know it to be thus solely because it is thus. That is what knowing means.

3.An act of knowing can be described in the
Cause-Effect version of ‘because’ – but uniquely so.

a.An act of knowing is conditioned by attention,
states of will, and health.

b.But its positive content is determined by the
truth it knows.

c.It is caused, but it is not determined by the
sum of its causes.

d.Any thing which professes to explain our
reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by
what is known, is really a theory that there is no reasoning.

e.Naturalism offers what professes to be a full
account of our mental behaviour; but this account, on inspection, leaves no
room for acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking,
as a means of truth, depends.

V.The origin of reason, historically, is difficult
to account for on a purely naturalistic basis.

1.Our Physical vision is a far more useful
response to light than that of cruder organisms which have only a
photo-sensitive spot. But neither this improvement nor any possible
improvements we can suppose could bring it an inch nearer to being a knowledge
of light.

2.It is not men with specially good eyes who know
about light, but men who have studied the relevant sciences.

b.Tradition and Repeated experience are to be
distinguished from Rational Thought.

i.Repeated experiences of finding fire where he
had seen smoke would condition a man to expect fire whenever he saw smoke. This
expectation, expressed in the form ‘If smoke, then fire’ becomes what we call
inference.

1.All such inferences are invalid.

a.Example

i.Water always boils at 212 (until someone tried a
picnic in the mountain).

2.The assumption that things which have been
conjoined in the past will always be conjoined in the future is the guiding
principle not of rational but of animal behaviour.

ii.Reason comes in precisely when you make the
inference ‘Since always conjoined, therefore probably connected’ and go on to
attempt the discovery of the connection.

iii.Sometimes, an inference can be made without
experience.

1.In these cases, those inferences proceed from
tautologies (axioms).

2.Tautologies are things which are completely and
certainly known.

3.The degree to which any true proportion is a
tautology depends on the degree of your insight into it.

a.Example

i.9 x 7 = 63 is a tautology to an arithmetician.

ii.9 x 7 = 63 is not a tautology to a child.

4.If Nature is a totally interlocked system, then
every true statement about her would be a tautology to an intelligence that
could grasp that system in its entirety.

VI.The problem is this: a naturalistic history is…
an account in Cause and Effect terms, of how people came to think the way they
do. And this of course leaves in the air the quite different question of how
they could possibly be justified in so thinking.

a.This imposes on him the very embarrassing task
of trying to show how the evolutionary product which he has described could
also be a power of ‘seeing’ truths.

b.The naturalist may in turn claim that inference,
too, is a product of natural selection, even if we cannot yet explain the
origin of inference.

i.The argument goes thusly:

1.What is most useful is what is selected.

2.Inference is quite useful.

3.Therefore, it is likely naturally selected.

ii.‘If useful, then true.’

iii.This, of course, is an inference.

1.And so is reducible to mere matters of Cause and
Effect.

c.The humble alternative for the naturalist is to
suspend any value to things like theology, ontology, metaphysics, etc…

i.But this also means suspension of belief in
naturalism, which is, after all, a metaphysical claim.

VII.Theism, on the other hand, offers itself as a
less audacious alternative to naturalism.

a.For the theist, reason is older than Nature, and
is the source of nature’s orderliness.

b.Reason, Logic, and Order, inherent in God, and
imparted to Nature, is the very thing that allows us to know Nature.

c.To subsume Reason under Nature would be to lose
both Reason and Nature.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Consequently the requirement to neither know nor name God in terms of presence traverses the entirety of Christian theology. (a) It appears in the Apologists of the second century - first Justin Martyr: "No one can utter a name for the ineffable God;" then Athenagoras: "Hear this, oh man: the form of God cannot be uttered, nor expressed and eyes of flesh do not have the power to see it." (b) Likewise, it shows up in the first of the Alexandrians - take the Christians, first Clement "the First Cause is not in space, but above space and time and name and conception ... For our interrogation bears on the formless and invisible"; "invisible and incapable of being circumscribed"; "the invisible and ineffable God." Then Origen: "God is incomprehensible and incapable of being measured." Consider also Philo, the Jew: "It is a great good to comprehend that God is incomprehensible in terms of his Being and to see that he is invisible." (c) And also Athanasius: "God is good and the friend of men.... By his nature, he is invisible and incomprehensible, residing beyond all begotten essence." (d) Basil clearly indicates the paradox with this remark: "[K]nowledge of the of the divine essence involves sensing His incompressibility." (e) And there is nothing surprising in the fact that Gregory of Nyssa should have repeated it almost word for word: "This is the true knowledge of what is sought [sc., seeing the invisible and incomprehensible God] - ; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incompressibility as by a kind of darkness." (f) John Chrysostom parses it in a slightly different form: "All the while knowing that God is, he [Saint Paul] does not know what his essence is," for "the essence of God is incomprehensible." (g) Of course John of Damascus comes next: "No one has seen God. The only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father has himself taught this. The divine is ineffable and incomprehensible" (h) Nothing different from Augustine: "God the highest, who is known better than knowing." (i) Nor from Bernard: "Non ea disputatio comprehendit, sed sanctitas: si quo modo tamen comprehendi potest quod incomprehensibile est." (k) Nor even from Thomas Aquinas, for whom seeing as "what God himself is remains hidden and unknown," it is necessary that man knows how to unknown. Thomas therefore comments on the principle advanced by Dionysius in perfectly appropriate terms: "[W]hat the substance of God is remains in excess of our intellect and therefore is unknown to us; on account of this, the highest human knowledge of God is to know that one does not know God." Without continuing ad infinitum with this anthology of citations, it seems legitimate to admit as a fact still to be explained that at least for the Church Fathers theology does not consist in naming God properly, but in knowing him precisely as what cannot be known properly - what must not be known, if one wants to know it as such.

Sunday, July 20, 2014

"Several years ago, I happened to be visiting my parents when a longtime friend of my mother died. As I left the funeral, I spoke briefly to the woman's son and in parting said, 'The Lord be with you.' Without hesitation, he responded , 'And also with you.' We had not seen one another in nearly a decade, but in that moment our common training in the Lutheran liturgy gave us words to say - Christian words - words of comfort and encouragement in the face of death.

Our common training in liturgy had taught us, in that moment at least, to speak Christianly."

I recalled this passage a week into Lent, the day we buried my brother-in-law, and stood silently over the grave site. My Irish uncle suggested we say an Our Father before departing, which we in turn did. It felt meet and right to have the grace of such words of solidarity in the face of death. And even now, as I never know soundly how to pray rightly, having the words of our Lord is an incredible blessing.